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login register ADVERTISE BACK ISSUES CONTACT US SUBSCRIBE search ARTGUIDE DIARY PICKS NEWS IN PRINT FILM 500 WORDS VIDEO PREVIEWS TALKBACK A & E BOOKFORUM 中文版 CRITICS' PICKS New York CURRENT PAST links New York Pat Steir Pat Steir CHEIM & READ Paul Ramirez Jonas 547 West 25th Street “Project Europa: Imagining February 17–March 26 the (Im)Possible” Nature resounds throughout Pat Steir’s four-plus decades of Hiraki Sawa painting, whether in likeness (a pour of paint imaging a Judith Linhares waterfall) or as principle (the pour’s own willful, wayward Josh Smith paths, lured by gravity). It is amply visible, too, in this Andy Warhol searching suite of recent “Winter Paintings”—abstractions of Geoffrey Farmer about eleven by eleven feet halved into two tall panels of Feng Mengbo color. Their diaphanous sheen, which appears to veil vistas or sheath rock faces, marks a shift away from Steir’s Mark Bradford signature patinas (bleaching cascades, stardusty splatter) Los Angeles and toward late Rothko’s wintry horizons. Vertical vitality James Benning makes the crucial difference here, along with the depths of The Date Farmers Steir’s elemental, mineral palette—evoking by turns rust and raw silk, ash glaze and lava flow, and nary a drop in San Francisco mercury. Trevor Paglen The thin shock of verdigris streaking down the center seam Atlanta of Winter Group 6: Light Green, Payne’s Grey and Red, 2009–11, flashes a glint of light, or perhaps grows Dana Schutz lichenlike, where dusky slate blue meets a blue-brown Pat Steir, Valentine, 2009–11, oil on canvas, Austin wash. One half of Winter Group 3: Red, Green, Blue and 10' 7" x 9' 1 1/4". Amanda Ross-Ho Gold, 2009–11, resembles shadowy gold-leafed snow, while the other burns with the dark heat of peat or flint. Such color tangencies seem to inquire into the Charlotte energy transfer, adhesive hinge, or potential melting points between evenly forceful precincts brought Janet Biggs close. In the smaller, all-red Valentine, 2009–11, too, questions of relation palpitate. If its reddest inner flush attests to passionate ignition, an encroaching left edge of sizzling carnelian and scratchy orange Dallas splashes opposite bare the wear and weatherings of a heart. Michel Verjux Some months ago, Steir’s Ariadnian The Nearly Endless Line, 2010, had trussed up the insides of Sue Minneapolis Scott Gallery via one continuous, occasionally knotting brushstroke along its walls. Stand near her “The Spectacular of canvases here to trace eerier, wirier lines amid the drips, like long cracks in thawing ice. Hinting at Vernacular” seismic activity, they discreetly electrify these paintings’ megalithic presence. Tampa — Chinnie Ding Trenton Doyle Hancock PERMALINK TALKBACK (0 COMMENTS) E-MAIL PRINT Washington, DC Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres Toronto Paul Ramirez Jonas Geoffrey Pugen ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES Mexico City 508 West 26 Street #215 February 23–April 2 Claire Fontaine New York isn’t nearly so crowded with commemorative London statuary as many older, European cities, but the grammar of Victoria Morton the sculptural tribute is familiar and resonant here Varda Caivano nonetheless. In The Commons, 2011, the centerpiece of his “Night Work” current show, Paul Ramirez Jonas has taken a landmark Ai Weiwei statue from the Campidoglio in Rome as his model. Ridding the original’s military horse of its imperial rider, Marcus Dublin Aurelius, the artist has remade the antique bronze in cork. Richard Tuttle This isn’t the first time that the California-born, Honduras- raised Jonas has employed the distinctive material; for Cambridge 2009’s Mercosul Biennial in Brazil, he used it to render a Lucia Nogueira series of alternative plaques for public monuments, effectively transforming the authoritative labels into a Berlin collection of open-access notice boards—all were fully Bob Mizer stocked with pushpins. Mark Soo The Commons plows a similar furrow; the life-size “When the Neighbor “When the Neighbor Came to Make a Phone sculpture’s base is dotted with paper ephemera that appear Call” to have been posted there by visitors. Everything—from press releases to cookie fortunes, offhand doodles to Porto gnomic pronouncements—fights for position. (I left behind a Paul Ramirez Jonas, The Commons, 2011, “To the Arts, Citizens!” business card and took away a handwritten recipe for cork and push pins, 10' 5" x 10' 4" x 5' 4". spinach lasagna.) It’s the kind of neat interplay between the Madrid personal and the municipal—with a nod to the literary if we Carlos Garaicoa think of Proust’s cork-lined study—that might function well as a Fourth Plinth project for London’s Trafalgar Square. In a gallery it feels a bit cooped up but remains a strikingly surreal image. The Beijing solitary companion work, a drawing of a seating plan collaged with entrance tickets, hints more quietly “Untitled” at thought around popular engagement. Taipei — Michael Wilson Jennifer Wen Ma PERMALINK TALKBACK (0 COMMENTS) E-MAIL PRINT “Project Europa: Imagining the (Im)Possible” MIRIAM AND IRA D. WALLACH ART GALLERY Columbia University, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, Schermerhom Hall, 8th Floor January 19–March 26 This group exhibition, organized in conjunction with the University of Florida’s Harn Museum of Art, takes up the democratic idealism and lived contradiction of the European Union some twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event in 1989 marked a physical and symbolic turning point, heralding the reunification of the continent, this time under the aegis of an imagined community dedicated to human rights and multiculturalism. It is in the examination of NEWS DIARY FILM these fault lines that “Project Europa” shines. Newest Entries As much as it is now convention to refer to Europe as a Melissa Anderson on concrete entity, the themes of boundaries and barriers, be Truffaut’s The Soft Skin they topographic or social, are foregrounded here as objects Amy Taubin on the films of investigation. Francis Alÿs’s video The Nightwatch, 2004, of Manuel De Landa documents the release of a fox—traditional symbol of the Michael Joshua Rowin on leisured chasse au renard—after hours at the National Certified Copy Portrait Gallery in London, following its clandestine Travis Jeppesen on We movement between genres and historical periods, in effect Were Here highlighting the rigidity of class and social capital in the UK. Tony Pipolo on Bresson’s Bruno Serralongue and Yto Barrada—working in Calais, Eva Lietolf, Althaldensleben (“Ollin”), 2006, Diary of a Country Priest France, and Ceuta, Spain, respectively—use photographic color photograph, 32 x 27”. From the series Nicolas Rapold on Putty documentation to articulate the persistent travails of border “German Images—Looking for Evidence,” 2006. Hill crossing and migration into Europe’s open societies. While those projects are more geopolitically literal, there is also an undercurrent of contained violence evoked consistently in the exhibition. Danish group Superflex’s projection Burning Car, 2008, is perhaps the most overt instance, but Andrea Robbins and Max Becher’s pictures from 2003 of strip malls in central France suggest the more subtle violence wrought by the homogenizing effects of globalization. More harrowing still, Eva Lietolf’s photo and text series “German Images—Looking for Evidence,” 2006, depicts tranquil German towns that were the sites of brutal hate crimes. Lietolf’s pictures are a perfect microcosm of “Project Europa,” which manages to concisely look beneath the banal, technocratic veneer of neoliberal Europe, exposing its hidden tragedies and the work that remains to be done. — Ian Bourland PERMALINK TALKBACK (0 COMMENTS) E-MAIL PRINT Hiraki Sawa JAMES COHAN GALLERY 533 West 26th Street February 17–March 26 Hiraki Sawa’s second solo show at this gallery is a multimedia meditation on temporality and texture. Sawa introduces these motifs in “Wax,” 2010–11, a series of twenty-four drawings in the gallery’s front room. These delicate pencil renderings of intricately mottled orbs, precise sections of which have been copiously erased, represent the waning and waxing phases of the lunar cycle. A composite portrait of time and a study of form and texture, this series sets the tone for the exhibition’s title piece: a complex and dreamy video-sound installation in the next room. Hiraki Sawa, O, 2009, multichannel video and O, 2009, is an immersive sensorial experience centered sound installation, dimensions variable. sound installation, dimensions variable. around three large freestanding video screens. The triptych’s flanking panels evoke the past by demonstrating physical evidence of time in natural and domestic settings. On the left, Sawa focuses his camera on desert geology—deep crevasses and ancient rock formations. The right panel features a dilapidated house where peeling wallpaper, cracked plaster, and remnants of a past life are haunted by the artist’s signature digitized silhouettes of birds, trees, and Ferris wheels. The central screen, in marked contrast, follows a flock of birds midflight in a majestic vision of life, motion, and the yet unknown. O’s sound track (a collaboration with musical ensemble Organ Octet) comprises soothing organ music punctuated by errant clatters and clangs. The noises relate to—and seem to emanate from—ten wall- mounted monitors showing video loops of solitary objects (lightbulb, mug, pitcher, and the like) gyrating like wobbly tops that never fall. In fact, the audio plays through five spinning mini-speakers strategically placed throughout the room. The echoing and undulating audio overlays are the perfect complement to Sawa’s visualization of time—wherein chronology is irrelevant, and past, present, and future coexist. — Mara Hoberman PERMALINK TALKBACK (0 COMMENTS) E-MAIL PRINT Judith Linhares EDWARD THORP GALLERY 210 Eleventh Avenue, Sixth Floor February 25–April 2 In Judith Linhares’s painting Picnic Rock, 2008, two naked woman loll on a blanket en plein air, enjoying a feast of chicken and layer cake.